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I’m putting all training details over on WeEndure, but a race is worth noting. Emerald Nuts Across the Bay 12k was this morning. I didn’t spend more than a few strides enjoying the morning view on the Golden Gate Bridge, but the weather was pretty nice and the race felt good: 47:39. I last ran this race in 2000, running a 46:54.

At times, the head gets racing, and despite myself, I can’t sleep. I’ve been up for a bit over two hours already. Been a productive time, actually, but it’s going to make the rest of this day pretty tough… the boy wakes up in probably 10 minutes, so not much point in trying to go back to sleep.

It’s also “the night before the night before” I join the running crowds for the Emerald Across the Bay 12K tomorrow, so I would have liked to be rested. Oh well. I’ll nap this afternoon if circumstances allow.

I’ve scheduled another visit to the Genius Bar for this evening, to fix the problem I thought was already solved.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, I suppose.

Update, March 17th The sleep problem reoccured, and now it’s gotten worse: the computer won’t start up. Heading back to the Genius Bar tonight. 🙁

I suppose the good news is that maybe after all this is solved, I can turn on Growl again, since it’s not longer clear that was the (only) problem.

It took a genius to figure out that Growl, the notification system for Mac OS X, was what caused the iMac G5 (PowerPC) to stop waking from sleep. I got totally fed up with unplugging the computer and restarting just to use the computer after two days, and made an appointment online to bring it to the genius.

Seriously, the genius was Ben at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store near Union Square in San Francisco. He repeated the problem which caused me to bring the computer in this evening (phew). Then he did a bunch of hardware checks without finding anything.

So, we started from another system, and the problem went away. Therefore, a software problem. First place we looked (at his suggestion) was in the Startup Items, since he’d seen that I had Quicksilver installed. He knew that utility does some low-level stuff, although he didn’t think that was necessarily the problem. I saw the Growl preference pane in the list, disabled it first, and BAM, problem solved. (I’m quite happy Quicksilver was not too blame. THAT I could not give up.)

That Growl was the problem is (a) surprising and (b) too bad.

Surprising because I’ve had Growl installed here at home for at least two months, so I’m not sure why it would start to cause a problem this week.

Too bad because I like the notifications, even though I use this computer less than the MacBook at work, where Growl is, well, growling along happily. It’s version 0.76 of the Universal Binary. I haven’t looked around to see if this problem is common/reported, but making this post to help others who may fall afoul of the sleep gods.

I was slightly misled by the slightly burnt smell coming from the computer (when I was looking at it closely). Ben at the Apple Store thought it was just dust near the processor, which really does get hot. Seems to be right.

I’m just happy I can put the computer to sleep again. I’m headed there myself.

After fighting allergies during the last two beautiful days in San Francisco, it’s time to clean out the inbox from the last few weeks.

• The Daily Mail reminds us all of Worldmapper, which tries to use maps to tell different truths. All maps distort reality. These maps do it deliberately, which makes them more honest than usual.
• How to grow a super athlete from the New York Times includes a reference to an article from the USOC, which boils down to “it takes 10 years of extensive training to excel in anything.” The research focuses on athletes, but the broader lesson is…there is no silver bullet. (link)
• I was all excited about this Sony product for converting videos to DVDs until I learned that it doesn’t include an actual VCR player. Ours is dead, and I almost don’t want to replace it. I certainly hope to transfer this analog material to digital.
• Thanks to Kevin Burton, I’m watching News War. I’d rather do it on TV, but the online stuff is solid, too.
• Intuit continues to try and get us to upgrade Quicken. Although I admire the company, the Mac version from 2002 still works just fine…and I’m not sure what new stuff was added in the last five years. I’m not yet willing to put all this online, but I’m more likely to do that than upgrade to Quicken for Mac 2007.
• I came across GreenDimes via Stephen O’Grady. Not jumping on it yet, but I’m curious.
• Jakob Nielsen reminds us that email newsletters are still one of the top ways to reach customers. While we offer our OpenDNS blog updates via email (sign up at blog.opendns.com, if you’re not an RSS fan), this has not been a focus. Small mistake, definitely.
• Video of a Google TechTalk in the Netherlands, on an interesting topic: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). It’s 50+ minutes, so I don’t know if/when I’ll ever watch. (Via Slashdot)
• Mike Masnick points out the irony that kids are reading more. The boy is tearing through books, but no video games yet.
• Thanks to George, I am no longer annoyed by the Mail.app error message for IMAP accounts about not being able to save the message.
• The Big Brother State, via infosthetics, is a short propaganda film.
• I picked up The Onion in print during lunch today, and then saw a video version is coming next month. Hope they can live up their high standards.

We went to see Zodiac earlier in the week, and I’m mildly glad we did. Though the saga went on for years, all the killing and concern was before our time here in San Francisco. So, if nothing else, we got to see a digitally-re-created Embarcadero Freeway, the time-lapse construction of the Transamerica Building, and what hasn’t changed (on the outside): the Chronicle Building on 5th and Mission.

Reminded that this was a David Fincher film, I’m actually less excited now. I thought Fight Club was one of the most impressive (and disturbing) films ever… and a forum for Edward Norton’s best work outside of American History X. Seven, another Fincher film, was simply disturbing, but also a story which made you look, even as you cringed. Zodiac never engaged me, though I never minded watching it.

Metacritic score of 77 seems a touch high.

Richard K. Morgan‘s third book, Market Forces, steps away from the world of Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). Like much notable fiction, Morgan spun a good story here out of a single exploratory thread: what happens to corporate politics in a world which is a state of managed disintegration?

Morgan’s answer? Sanctioned violence, with defined rules, is the new corporate ladder. You can’t be an unthinking thug, but you need the morals of a crocodile (i.e., none). This story of corporate aggression gone very, very wrong takes place in and around London, which now controls the poor in the “Zones.” This sharpening of the existing divide between rich and poor divides London as if by apartheid, though more directly economic in nature. That’s where the epithet whispered or graffitied in the Zones comes from: Zek-tiv. It took me a while, but that’s short for “executive.”

The corporates duel each other, with and without authorization, in their cars. Instead of competing bids being fought out over price ranges and other factors, the duelling firms literally duel, in their automobiles. To the death, if/as necessary — and leaving the opponent beaten yet alive is seen as weakness. Delivering the coup de grace often means shooting someone at close range, so the protective cocoon of the car doesn’t remove these individuals from the messy business of “getting ahead.”

While the author acknowledges a debt to the movie Mad Max, and lists a few anti-globalization volumes in a single page at the end of the book, my immediate comparison was to Car Wars.

Car Wars was Dungeons & Dragons, with a critical difference. Instead of rolling dice to match wizards and orcs, you found out whether your pickup truck’s armor could keep you from being scorched by a flamethrower in the neighboring Lincoln Town Car. I played this game for couple of years in middle school, before I could drive (fortunately!?). I sold all my remaining material on eBay back in 2000. The only drastic difference between Car Wars and Market Forces? One of the rules in Market Forces is no projectiles fired from a moving car.

Anyway… the novel ranges far beyond the battles on the highways, but those duels do center the story, viscerally. It’s not a happy tale. I found it more compelling (if disturbing) than Morgan’s first two books. I will proceed on to Woken Furies, another Kovacs novel, and it appears a title Black Man is coming out this year. I’ll be reading.

I forget where I came across Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, by Rob Austin and Lee Devin. But something about the description led me to put it on my wish list, which led to getting the book for Christmas. (Thanks, Alexis.)

The book uses analogies to how theater companies create a dynamic performance under set time pressures to describe how managers can lead without defining each step along the way towards the goal. In many ways — as the authors recognize — artful making complements the idea of agile development.

Agile, as I’ve learned it, has been more about development than full organizational process and thinking. But certainly some of the same lessons apply in a world where work can be (and often is) about delivering an experience, defined by code and language, through nothing but the product of several individual brains.

The authors emphasize their theater model, even in their language. In a quote that struck me, I’ve changed “director/manager” to director for simplicity:

A manager cannot necessarily know what workers are doing, cannot tell them what to do, but can often influence their focus. Focus is hard for individuals, as we have seen. It’s even harder for organizations. But through influence on focus, good directors can lead the group to release in productive directions, into territory rich with potential. [p. 93]

Since my work is a rich combination of my own individual contributions and coordinating the contributions of individuals, Artful Making helped describe the practices in a meaningful way. It doesn’t hurt that the language is not dense with business jargon, and the total volume is relatively light. The authors stay away from repeating themselves too much, which seems to be a standard practice in business books. While it’s a poor website, navigationally, you can read the introduction online for free to get a sense of the ideas.

I just spent 20+ minutes voting on submissions at PhishTank, and I got to the end. Meaning, I voted on all the currently online, unverified submissions.

In case you’ve haven’t reached this (temporary) nirvana, feast your eyes. Click the thumbnail for a larger version.

Paul Graham has another essay posted: “Is It Worth Being Wise?”

The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence.

When I was competing as an athlete over a decade ago, I was pursuing “intelligence,” in Graham’s definiton of being able to do very few things exceptionally well. Knowing that most of the important things in life are hard (impossible) to measure, I wanted to see where I stacked up on one of the few scales that is consistent and known. For a good chunk of time, I had to be selfish.

Now, most of the time, I’m aiming at “wisdom,” in Graham’s definition of being good, on average, across a wide range of situations. Discipline is a positive trait, but it is limiting. I suppose I’m willing to accept those limits because I know I need others more now.

Read the essay for a more adept comparison of the two traits. This is less compelling than many of Graham’s essays, but it’s still notable. Even intelligent.

On Tuesday afternoon, KPIX, the local San Francisco/Bay Area CBS affiliate ran a ConsumerWatch segment called “Faster Internet For Free?” They didn’t need the question mark, because this was about OpenDNS. (Yes, I’m biased.) It was a good description of DNS, which isn’t easy for a non-technical audience. Kudos to Allison for convincing the CBS folks that this topic can work on television.

As in October, with PhishTank, the segment was about two minutes long, and it was the teaser going into commerical about two-thirds of the way through the show. Here’s the OpenDNS blog post about the segment.

My sister thinks I’m getting better on camera now because of the iSighting we do to keep in touch. Charitable of her… but I enjoyed doing it. Here’s a direct link to the video.

Oh, and it’s better to wear blue or any stronger color if you’re going to be on camera… which I knew, but didn’t pursue. Now I see why it’s worth making an extra effort: too washed out.